Asleep in the Garden

I awoke thinking of my first failure every year during Holy Week. Year after year, you see, I doze off during the reading of the Passion.  So it’s easy for me to avoid judging the disciples for their shortcomings while Jesus was being humiliated and tortured, starting right in by falling asleep right there in the Garden while he was in such distress.  I’m one of them. Here at the mere entrance to the week, the Sunday that starts it all, I’ve blown it already, even as the child in me is determined to be good, to be His perfect friend, the kind this Perfect Friend deserves.  And with that failure my holy Week becomes a reprise of my flawed Lent.  I’m like the seed that falls on shallow soil.  I spring up quickly but having shallow roots, fade quickly too. 

Just as I begin to feel despair at my imperfection, I remembered that I’m in this with some friends I’ve picked up along the way: the Samaritan woman at the well I have named Atashaah, my best estimation of the word “thirst” in Arabic.  From her I will seek the senses of taste, smell, and hearing; the man born blind I have similarly named Mashad for “sight”, from whom I will seek that sense; and Lazarus, from whom I will watch for awareness of touch.

In my story, I am there with the disciples…no we four are there with the disciples, and as my eyelids are getting heavy, I hear my three friends having a muffled but intense conversation. 

Mashad: "Look at that slight tremor in his hand.  Can you see it?  Look at the way his vein catches the shadow if the evening twilight, at the way it throbs with his pulse, as if it would burst."

Atashaah: "Listen to the quiver in his voice, to the rasp in his breathing!"

Lazarus: "I have felt this myself, as I was dying."

Mashad looks at me, sees my eyelids drooping, while Atashaah hears my breathing slow as I approach sleep.  Lazarus feels my slowing pulse he shakes me awake.

Atashaah: (to me and the sleeping disciples, strong and stern in her demeanor) "Wake up!  How can you sleep? 

Mashad: (sitting, reaching out as if begging them) "You have spent weeks with this man and yet you cannot see what a blind man could see, how he suffers!"

Lazarus: (voice quivering as he weeps) "What is the rock you hide behind that separated you from him?  How can you be so close to him and yet separate yourself?"

And now I turn from this and prepare begin my day.  These three come with me as I set out.  I bring with me the doubt of my sincerity, my faithfulness, my perseverance even as I look at Holy Week ever so slightly showing on the eastern horizon.  But I know that I have these three, and I have hope that they can help me be a more true companion of this most true Friend, to be my eyes and ears and nose and tongue and touch as I enter my numbingly compulsive patterns of living.